‘Let go dad, I’m gone’: a father charts the anguish of losing a son too young

Death comes at us, unswerving, immense, pressing on us its only gift, infinite absence. Mostly we face away from it. Too often we are faintly reminded of it when we deal with losses of one kind or another.

Elizabeth Bishop came at this connection in her own querulously open-hearted way when she began her famous poem of loss with, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

And when a 26-year-old Tennyson, confronting the sudden death of his close friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law, wrote , “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O sea!” his words almost howl at the vast inhuman presence of careless death.

But it is one (sometimes profound) thing to see and respond to the immanence of death in the world, and another thing entirely when a person you love, someone you might have raised from childhood or known intimately for decades, suddenly and too early dies. This exposes each one who experiences it to almost unbearable pain and almost complete darkness in the soul.

Warwick McFadyen, a journalist and poet, has published two short books, which he calls “tidal charts”, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories in response to the sudden death of his son , Hamish, who died at the age of 21 in 2019.

Review: The Ocean: a meditation, in prose and poetry on grief/The Centre of Zero: poems 2019-2024 – Warwick McFadyen (McFadyen Media)

As with Nick Cave’s recent discussions with Sean O’Hagan in the book Faith, Hope and Carnage , there is no escaping the raw and catastrophic despair the loss of a child presses upon a parent. Both Cave and McFadyen take to articulating this experience in directly powerful and honest prose, and also take themselves towards song, lyric and poetry.

Some, in their grief will fall into a prolonged silence, while some go to painting, some to dance, some to meditation, or renewed friendships. Almost any discipline we choose can be our negotiation between denial and acceptance, celebration and curse, between ongoing love and love stopped in its tracks.

McFadyen’s book, The Ocean , begins with

Every day I stare into the abyss, and say good morning. Before sleep, I go to it and say good night, adding, See you in the morning. The abyss sits on a shelf.

The Ocean is a series of short prose reflections ordered chronologically according to the time elapsed since his son’s death, the first at two months and the last three years later.

He calls his anguish at two months a “monstrous wave” and a dense, black, dead star in his heart. He writes of times spent with his son, their conversations, shared interests, in such a way that as a reader I wished I had known this beautiful young man.

Sometimes the writing breaks into poetry or talks about poets who have written about death in ways that carry meaning for McFadyen – Shakespeare, Rilke, TS Eliot. Sometimes there are details of ongoing life, such as his attempts to know how to answer the well-meaning question, “How are you?”

At two years, he writes,

The here and now of him is like a small boat sailing from me on an ocean too wide and too deep to hold it back. Sometimes, in the ever-widening parting of the years I think I can hear him say, let go dad, I’m gone.

The changes in feelings are tracked in these pieces of writing while the pain and unutterable loss remains in every image he reaches for as a writer working at his craft.

The need to keep feeling

Nearly two and a half years beyond Hamish’s death McFadyen uncovers a diagnosis for his state of heart in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5): prolonged grief disorder.

The diagnosis means doctors can now ask insurance companies to make compensation payments to those suffering this absolutely normal reaction to catastrophic loss. It will also mean that doctors can prescribe medications engineered to relieve such suffering. Naltrexone, a drug for heroin withdrawal, is being tested for this very purpose.

McFadyen excoriates this deafness “to the murmurings of the soul”. His act of writing, his marking of time, his feelings expressed here are nothing like an expression of illness, nor themselves a manual for recovery or even a guide to healing. If grief is taken out of the landscape that is left after you have lost someone you love, he asks, “what is left?”

“To lament is to love even when the object of that love has gone”, he writes, and somehow this assertion of the need to keep feeling is a much more important reminder than identification of this experience (so common to all of us) as a disorder.

The later pages of The Ocean are given to poems in a short-lined free-verse style that swings between specific images of how the loss of Hamish comes at him again and again, with wider poems that take in nature, its cycles, seasons, and moods.

It is as though this loss has at first forced these poems from him, then with this gate opened, the poet in him has been let loose to write about nature. McFadyen is a surfer, too, so it is not surprising he turns to the ocean, to the seasons, to waves and the “lapping of each moment” as images of what he calls “the long leaving”.

In the final passage of this fine and honest book, more than three years after the death of Hamish, he tries to lay down his reasons for writing of his loss in this way. For him, “language is the bridge for one soul to cross to another.” He wants, in doing this, to extract the right words, the precise words, while remaining true to the unplanned “tidal surge of giving voice to thoughts in prose and poetry.”

Who knew that ashes would weigh the same in your arms as when you held him as a baby.

The companion book to The Ocean, The Centre of Zero , is a series of poems broken into sections under the headings Water, Light, Earth, Voices, Time.

The opening section is a paean, a love song, a lament, and a sometimes joyous expression of his passion for the waves, currents, the movement of light on rivers and oceans.

Later, within the section on Earth he writes of the plaque prepared for Hamish and “for the sun to kiss”. The poetry is simple, the feelings direct, and within this McFadyen holds the long ache of love for a child who was so vividly on his way into life that those who loved him cannot stop keeping him alive in their love.

These books stand as tributes to that young life lost and as manifestations of grief. They might not be what you want to read now but they might be what you will be grateful to read at a certain time.

Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.